Just when you thought it was safe to visit that clichéd gas station staffed by murderous rednecks again,
Rob Zombie has once again threatened to leave the recording studio and park himself in the directors chair. After the ludicrous mouth-breathing orgy of guts and gore that constituted his first two feature films- House of a Thousand Corpses and The Devils Rejects- earned him a world-wide cult following, overwhelmingly from the heavy-metal demographic shared with his musical career, Zombies film making has been on a hiatus, during which horror cinema has changed significantly. In the years since The Devils Rejects gritty, sadistic pseudo-verité horror-films, with little or no interest in any broader concerns than making audiences wince through revulsion, have become ubiquitous and therefore pedestrian. In the world of post torture porn film-making audiences are as much likely to be bored by the traversing of familiar paths; mercifully the information leaked thus far implies a change of direction from his first two films to tackle more thematically elevated materiel.
The Lords of Salem will begin shooting
this spring and will be, once again, based on an original script by Zombie that's adapted from his own song he wrote; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0NoICl7cE Salem, notorious for its 17th century witch trials, is a familiar location for writers of horror- and has been a particular favourite of Stephen King on the occasions he departs from the town of Maine. Zombie has embraced this history as the film sees the town coming under attack from a three hundred year old witchs coven. Zombie had been associated with dozens of projects including a number of remakes and sequels, but ultimately pursued his own project having been offered complete artistic control. Speaking to
Deadline, Zombie previously said:
What excited me most was Jason (Blum) saying, you can have total control over the script, casting and final cut. I said Im in... I wanted to break away from anything related to pre-existing material, The remake train is getting pretty tired now and when I made Halloween, everybody complained, either that it was too much like the original or too different. I like that people either love or hate what I do because its better than being in the middle, which means forgettable. But when you do an original premise, they take it on face value and after three years of not being able to win on Halloween, I just couldn't go through that again.
Certainly, Zombies idealistic sentiments are to be admired, and it is to be hoped this translates to a more substantive piece than he has hitherto delivered.